The invention relates to the high-speed, high-volume conveying of small articles which are to be sorted by being conveyed from a loading station to one of a number of discharged hoppers disposed along a conveying path. In particular, the invention relates to the discharge hoppers.
Such a conveying/sorting apparatus is used to sort articles such as packages in mail-order facilities and courier services, for example. The apparatus typically includes a rail which defines the conveying path, and a number of transport devices which travel along the rail between the loading and collecting stations. Each transport device includes a platform, such as a driven endless belt, which receives articles at the loading station and discharges them onto collection devices at respective collective stations.
Various types of conveying/sorting machines are known; in particular, commonly owned patent GB 2,111,933, relates to a sorting plant which comprises a number of transport devices, each having a rotation apron or belt constituting an article transport and unloading platform. The transport devices move along a fixed route lines with hoppers designed to collect, and thereby sort, the articles. The articles, suitably coded on the basis of their destination, are loaded into individual cells in a loading station where sensing devices (e.g., scanners) check the type of parcel (size, weight, etc.), match each parcel with a transport platform, and load the articles into respective transport devices passing through the loading station. The transport device then transports its article to the respective hopper and discharges the article into the hopper.
The use of hoppers that are capable of carrying out a further sorting of the discharged articles is known for example from Italian Patent No. 1,122,898. Those hoppers comprise one or more tiltable bulkheads or plates capable of selectively defining various channeling routes into which the discharged article can be addressed. That kind of hopper is particularly advantageous because, it enables the degree of sorting to be increased without increasing the number of final destinations for the transport devices, and without increasing the length of the plant. Thus, the plant manufacturing costs are minimized, without actually affecting the performance as a whole.
In an effort to maximize the performance of a plant, i.e., to increase the number of objects handled per hour, it has been proposed to use transport devices each having transport platforms arranged on two vertically superposed planes (see concurrently filed application Ser. No. 08/749,230 (attorney docket no. 024444-294).
The object of the present invention is to provide a discharge hopper that is capable of receiving and sorting articles received simultaneously from such superposed transportation platforms, to enable them to be sent to the same or different final containers.
A further object of the present invention is to provide such a hopper which operates in a reliable, simple way and which is not too expensive to manufacture.